#zen browser

I'll preface by saying that like, they're infinitely better than Microsoft or Google or any of the other Chrome-in-a-trenchcoat browsers but still, as someone who's staunchly anti-ai, this newest stuff isn't surprising to me.

If you've been on the Mozilla newsletter at all or paying attention to their other projects, you'll know that they've been on the AI train for a while now. What sets them apart is their insistence on "safe ai" and "responsible ai". They do a lot of talks about it and conventions as well.

As much as I appreciate the sentiment, and this newest "kill switch" is nice... my position remains the same. The only safe or responsible ai is no ai at all. There is no ethical or consumer-friendly use for the tech, plain and simple. So I have been kind of gaining a growing animosity towards Mozilla over the past year or so.

Did you know that you can now enable tab-grouping in Firefox by changing one setting in about:config, and it's really easy? Here are the instructions:

You guys I am SO RELIEVED about the above tab-grouping revelation re: Firefox, I cannot even.

When my adblocker stopped working in Chrome it basically made the internet unusable for me, and the main reason I wasn't already using Firefox was the lack of tab-grouping. So I had basically no mainstream options, and I ended up using Zen, which is based on Firefox but has an okay workspaces UI that is somewhat like tab-grouping, but it's not ideal and Zen is buggy in a lot of other ways that are sometimes unpredictable. (Google Sheets just was not working well, and I really need that. I reported many bugs but it did not help.)

I was using that for several weeks but there was still a lot of friction and it was adding a lot of strain to my life in a background way that I couldn't prevent.

So finding out that Firefox was rolling out tab-grouping meant I was opening and checking Firefox several times a day to see if my tabs were groupable! And then I learned that you could change a setting in about:config to get the feature sooner…

GAME-CHANGER.

as of 2 days ago, zen is officially ONE YEAR OLD!

here's what the official people had to say about it lol

Since it's a Firefox fork, most things work how I expect them to work, so it's been pretty painless. The customization is even better than Firefox which I never expected, but it's very welcome.

I'm still going to run into the same rendering and adoption issues I have with gecko, but I'm done caring about Mozilla in any capacity and I am saved from switching to a chromium fork. For now.

YOUUUU BASTARDDDDDS

Basically, ads are ADHD anathema (ADHDA, if you will) so any browser that doesn't let me block ads properly is just not usable for me.

I knew it was coming, I heard that uBlock Origin was going to break on Chrome from June/July last year because of some kind of technical situation that I didn't fully understand between uBlock and Chrome. Obviously it's over 6 months since then so I was hoping that maybe the change had happened and it just wasn't noticeable. I really wanted to keep using Chrome because Firefox is the only real alternative and Firefox doesn't have tab grouping (except for clunky extensions that kind of do Chrome tab groups but in a more complicated and obscure way).

Yesterday I restarted Chrome and blammo, no more uBlock Origin. So yeah, I never believed anything would stop me from using Chrome, but that's the thing that did it.

I asked on Mastodon and someone suggested Zen browser (based on Firefox) and said it had "workspaces" that were a bit like tab groups. So I tried it out and yeah, it's a decent UI, I think I can get used to this. And most Firefox extensions work on it, including uBlock Origin. :) Relief.